Work

The Personal Development Cafe is both for those people new to personal development and for those already exploring coaching and neuro linguistic programing (nlp). The café sessions are designed to be informative, stimulating and compliment other Personal Development Circle North East’ workshops.

“If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” Gandhi

As a member of the Personal Development Cafe part you will:

– Discover the benefits of using personal development techniques
– Learn tools for confidence, motivation & the power of your mind
– Gain an understanding of the science and behind personal development
– Feel motivated and supported by the group
– Progress to become the person you want to become

Café sessions are monthly and run for 2 hours. In a relaxed and informal setting the sessions will start with a coffee followed by “some food for thought” – an informative and stimulating talk. Then it’s time for “café chatter” to open up discussion. We finish with some “clearing up” and self-reflection which is for your eyes only.

You are welcome to “drop in” on individual café sessions, but you may find benefit from regular attendance.

No matter what your goals and dreams may be or at what level you are to achieving them. With consistent motivation, a deeper understanding of the power of your mind, good clear teaching, and a friendly group of people behind you, you will gain a deeper understanding and belief in yourself from which change will naturally develop.

You can choose from our Café menu over the following dates

Personal Development Circle North East

March 8th Start thinking right

Start right thinking

There’s a battle going on in our minds, a daily conversation with ourselves which if it’s going well, can make our day and if it not well “I might as well not even bother !!!!” (does this sound familiar?)

The true fact is that our bodies and behaviours are affected by the way we think. We think in patterns that develop habits, our brain remembers these habits and like a well-worn path, they are stored in the neurology of the brain.

More often than not we talk down to ourselves, talk ourselves out of things and limit our opportunities before that have even entered the room. When was the last time you told yourself how amazing you are?

The good news is that our brain can learn a new path, and the more often we choose a better path the more worn it becomes until it becomes a new path of better thinking.

So in this session we are going to explore a little bit about how the brain works, the physical effects of both positive and negative self-talk and write ourselves some affirmations to take home, so we can start the day on the right path.

April 26th Your personality types

May 24th Understanding your values

June 14th Communicating with confidence

July 19th Love yourself and others

August No meeting – summer break

September 20th Hear your Inner wisdom

October 18th The fear factor

November 15th Towards your spiritual self

PAID members £10 per session

Unpaid / Non members can purchase tickets (if any available) from Eventbrite £15 … or pay on the door.

Having the theory of a desired outcome of goal is no use if you do not have the right emotional state or required behaviour to achieve it!

On this workshop you will learn how to work towards your goals and outcomes by changing your behaviour, your sensory perspective, values and skills.

We will focus on Robert Dilts‘ Neurological Levels, where it stands in NLP, and how best to use it to work towards goals and outcomes – adynamic interactive workshop with underlying theory and practical activities to take home!

Over the next few sessions we will be exploring various techniques to help you create positive mind states and behaviours to help you achieve what you want from life.

Some of the many techniques we will use include how to:

Creating “Well-Formed” Outcomes that develop behaviourial shifts

Reframe negative thought patterns into positive behaviours

Overcome limiting beliefs

Deal with Inner Conflict

Creating Compelling & Alternative Futures

Move quickly from present state to a desired state

Operate from a solutions focused mindset

Create a state of “As If” you already had all the resources you need.

You don’t need to know anything about at all about NLP or personal development, but you will gain a lot from this session even if you are already familiar with this approach – a friendly and fun session open to experienced NLP people and beginners alike!

Again, the meeting is open to ANYONE looking for new tools to help them achieve their personal goals or is simply interested in finding new ways to help make positive change.

Tea and Coffee provided.

Each month we cover a different coaching topic covering personal development with practical tools to facilitate positive change in ourselves. In the past we’ve explored techniques to improve self-esteem, dealing with fears & phobias, stress/anxiety, coaching, goal-setting, and many more.

If you work at a company that offers an email account and most of your business is handled via Internet, then you know that excessive emails are annoying. Customer accounts, contracts, and other important documents we do not want to loose, so to keep your mailbox from piling up, it is smart to only give your email address to clients. We can avoid emails piling up by not providing information to advertisements that ask for our information. If you want to place, an order for a product be sure to use an email account that does not send out information over the Internet. Many companies have a managing program that works to save time. Databases often store valuable information, and should be maintained. If you store information on the database, be sure to delete or store old files in a different area, so you can save time. If your email accounts only stores documents that are important to your business, you can save not only time, but also you can spare yourself from liabilities that may creep up. It depends on the company and what type of email account they require the employee to use, but Microsoft Outlook includes features such as address books, business and other features that help the user stay organized.

Essential Notes

Notes are essential since they too play a role in time management. Learning the techniques to taking good notes is a start in the right direction. When we take good notes, we are able to stay organized and run our life smoothly. If you attend a lot of meetings, it might be wiser to meet with the parties attending the meeting before it starts. This can help manage time by informing the co-workers ahead of the game what the meeting entails, as well as enabling you to take notes before the meeting starts. Essentials in time management also include taking time out for yourself, preparing, keeping your priorities in order, and working toward the goals you set.</fo

Life is full of essentials, and if we have the ingredients to make it work, then you are lucky. Time management is one of the most important foundations in our lives. If you think about it, we have 24 – hours a day and seven or eight of …

Time Management Essentials: 13 Routines For Improving Your Life. I’m usually against adopting strict, boring routines in my lifestyle, unless they can really improve the quality of my life. But even yet, I don’t like boring things at …

I must be quite a sight at work. A large paper fish is wedged into my monitor to conceal new email alerts. I wear a Madonna-taking-an-aerobics-class headset, not for hands-free calls, but to block out noise (invariably, there’s someone close by, shouting my name because I can’t hear them). And I read out loud to stop myself just going through the motions. You see, I’m trying to concentrate. And there’s a lot stacked up against it.

In a new book, The Art of Concentration, the health writer Harriet Griffey argues that we are experiencing an attention crisis. Office workers are interrupted every three minutes, so at best we have a three-minute attention span, and 62% of us are addicted to email. Meanwhile, a recent study at the University of California calculated that we are bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information a day, including roughly 100,000 words (a figure that has more than doubled in the past 30 years). What’s more, the trend-spotting agency The Future Laboratory talks of “filter failure”, “information anxiety” (fretting about awaited emails) and “stuffocation” (the state of being overwhelmed by years of consumption). No wonder we self-diagnose attention-deficit disorder.

“In Britain, we work the longest hours and get the least done,” says The Future Laboratory’s Chris Sanderson. “It’s a big problem.” An “attention economy” has emerged, where the scarce commodity is human attention.

“The ability to concentrate is the X factor,” says Griffey, whose book, promisingly subtitled Enhance Focus, Reduce Stress and Achieve More, unpacks all the latest science (plus Buddhist thinking) on focus. She points out that we are experts at “sabotaging, daydreaming and distraction”. Thirty per cent of the time, we don’t think about what we’re doing. Even the brainiac Alain de Botton struggles. “The constant thrill the internet can deliver is hard to challenge,” he admits. “I don’t manage much work while ostensibly at work.”Related Links

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* Call to bring ‘smart drugs’ out of the closet

We are our own worst enemies, says Griffey. We develop avoidance strategies, instinctively seeking the path of least resistance to binge on virtual comfort food. Yet it takes, on average, 15 minutes to refocus after an interruption. Email is addictive because it brings reward: an invitation, a joke, some attention — simple lab-rat science. If I ate food, say, like I checked my digital portals, I’d think I had a serious problem.

I do, and it has a name, coined by a former Apple employee, Linda Stone. Continuous partial attention (CPA) describes this behaviour. “We are always on high alert, scanning the periphery for other opportunities,” she says. CPA, and the concomitant state of the do-it-now mentality, make us multitask, and speedily, so concentration is poor and mistakes are made. We all know that reading emails while on the phone to a client or when out with friends doesn’t work.

Griffey says we can all concentrate well and do the job once. Concentration leads to success. We’d leave work earlier. We’d also get more out of food, music, people, flat-pack furniture, everything. But avoidance, negative thinking and digital dependence are formed habits, so stopping them takes discipline.

There could be longer-term implications. De Botton argues that a lack of concentration is affecting our ability to be alone and unstimulated, and it could make us stupid. While scientists know our behaviour is changing, they don’t know how that affects our neural structure. We must relearn how to concentrate, says De Botton, who has all but banned his children from computers.

Naturally, Griffey, an erstwhile “flutter-brain”, is “very good now” at concentrating, but arguably the biggest driver was having children. “With babies, you have 90 minutes to yourself, tops, to focus,” she says. “Eight hours now seems an infinite time.”

From the man who thought five hours’ work a week was too much — Timothy Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek — comes the “low-information diet”, where you focus on output (work), not input (news, emails, surfing). Ferriss talks of “attention management” — which, he argues, we need like time management. “Information consumes attention,” he says. “ The only option is selective ignorance — one of the few common traits among top performers.” De Botton supports this notion: “My real work happens in bed or in the bath — away from the infernal machine.”

Information dieters report feeling as refreshed as after a two-week holiday. But as we already know, dieting runs counter to our natural impulses — no wonder we are seeing the rise of internet-addiction clinics. That’s just the start of the attention economy. The Future Laboratory predicts attention managers, deletion parties and time coaches. IBM, Intel and Deloitte are implementing “technology quarantines” — no-email days, no-computer days even — and with positive results: improved relations and greater productivity.

If we want results, we need to “single-task”, says Ferriss, finishing one task before starting another, and resisting instant gratification. “Lots of people say they’d love to write a book,” says Griffey. “I say, you can. You just need to concentrate for long enough.” It’s time to start paying attention to paying attention.

PAY ATTENTION NOW

Practice the five-more rule Force yourself to read for five more minutes, write for five more minutes or learn five more things before getting distracted.

Personal intimidation in the workplace can be hard to define and doesn’t always come from above. Cath Janes looks at the grey area where bluntness ends and bullying begins

Bullying happens in many places, put is often hard to define in the workplace. Illustration: Simon Pemberton

The allegations levelled against Gordon Brown this week are a timely reminder that bullying is not ­simply the domain of the playground. Workplace bullying is on the rise, a by-product of the added pressure placed on workers and employers by the recession.It can be hard to know where to draw the line between gruff management style and intimidation of a darker, more personal nature. Yet for some, the question of whether their boss is a bully needs no debate.

“Early in my career I had a boss so awful that I used to cry over the things he said,” says lawyer Julie English. “Nothing I did ever seemed good enough and he used to have tantrums and shout at people. Then two years later I found myself working with a boss who prided himself on his honesty. He was really brutal and I sometimes wondered if he too was deliberately trying to make me cry. Looking back, I was surrounded by dysfunctional people.”

It’s a familiar tale: tears, tantrums, the nagging feeling that you’re no good. So it may surprise you to know that English doesn’t believe this was bullying. “It never even occurred to me that this constituted bullying,” she says. “They were difficult colleagues but they made me raise my game and made me a better lawyer. I learned a lot of lessons from them that other, kinder bosses failed to teach me.”

Employers should have zero tolerance for intimidation or bullying, but does that mean there is no place for straight talking?

According to the Department of Trade and Industry, bullying is the intimidation of an employee by physical or verbal violence, abuse or humiliation. It includes being picked on, being unfairly treated or blamed for incidents, being routinely overworked and consistently denied career or training opportunities. It is behaviour that happens privately or in front of colleagues and in any form of communication.

It is an issue underpinned by startling statistics. A recent survey by the Unison union and Company magazine revealed one-third of young women claim to have been bullied, often by other women. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) claims 70% of managers have witnessed bullying in the last three years and that bullying costs the UK £13.8bn per year.

Yet there is a danger in confusing bullying with straight talking. To assume that the latter is always the former could make us incapable of looking our colleagues in the eye for fear of unbalancing their delicate constitutions. So when is a bullying boss really only a gruff manager?

When their comments are connected to the work and not the person, says Mandy Rutter, clinical manager at Axa Icas, health and wellbeing specialist: “They won’t have personal criticisms about that person, won’t single them out and will be consistently straight talking with everybody. It may be difficult to hear comments connected to performance or behaviour but it is also adult-to-adult communication with evidence to back it up.”

Honesty can be warranted yet cruel and, according to Rutter, when we are under stress we respond emotionally.

There are occasions, though, when tough talking is needed. The recession has demonstrated this and redundancies, restructuring and bankruptcy have forced us to have the difficult conversations we’d rather avoid.

“We need to get better at having robust dialogue because difficult conversations about employee performance are one of the biggest challenges for managers and it’s too often avoided,” says Penny de Valk, chief executive of the Institute of Leadership and Management. “If there is not a performance culture in an organisation some employees will see this as bullying because they haven’t experienced it before. In fact it can be beneficial to have a frank approach and staff can thrive on that clarity. It is not bullying to address important issues, gain clarity or acknowledge what an employee has done to contribute to an issue. Softening the message too much means it can get lost.”

Nina Dar, founder of Cheeky Monkey, a change management consultancy, agrees. She admits she shocks clients’ employees because she is direct and honest, but believes this is the key to success.

“I’ve had grown men tell me that I’m scary. I’ve also seen people cry because of my comments. Yet increasingly we see employees who are happy to work with this style because they want to be treated like adults who can handle challenges,” she says.

“This is different to bullying, which means hurting someone, lashing out at them, being inconsistent and chipping away at their confidence. I recognise that if employees want to work as a team they have to talk to each other honestly. It’s about having adult conversations and enjoying the results.”

Yet tough talking can become bullying, an easy line to cross. Bullies erode an employee’s judgment, sometimes so subtly that it is hard to know what is unacceptable. The issue is further complicated by the stereotypes. We can be so busy scrutinising superiors for bullying behaviour we forget to scrutinise those alongside or below us.

“I took on a job with managerial responsibility and one colleague, to whom I was senior, caused me enormous problems,” says teacher Mike Durrant. “He was an awkward character and refused to co-­operate with the changes I was proposing. He’d deliberately miss meetings and refuse to share tasks. I complained to our line manager and was told to learn to deal with him.

“It got worse. He’d shout at me in classrooms or meetings and became determined to battle me. I also discovered that my predecessor had left because of him, as had someone more senior. I had no control over him and my managers did nothing either, so I had no one to turn to for help.”

Durrant developed such serious depression he had to be hospitalised and has been unable to work since 2008. He is in no doubt this bullying is responsible for his ill health.

According to a CMI survey, 63% of managers have witnessed bullying between peers and 30% have witnessed subordinates bullying their managers.

Yet while some behaviour, such as discrimination, threats or violence, is clearly defined legally, bullying is a grey area. Elin Pinnell, an employment law specialist at Capital Law LLP, says: “There should be zero tolerance of bullying in any workplace yet there is no rule book about what defines it. Take swearing. If you work on a building site and it is part of the daily banter, does this constitute bullying? You can debate it until you are blue in the face but it really does depend on the impact it has upon each employee.”

Also, those displaying this behaviour may be unaware of its impact. “I don’t know if he was being a bully,” says marketing manager Jim Davies of a former-colleague. “There were times when butter wouldn’t melt and he’d be upset to know he’d hurt you. But then his deviousness would be so transparent that he looked like a man who actually enjoyed bullying people.

“He was also very manipulative. He’d temper his comments with ‘I’m only being honest’, or ‘It’s not about you, it’s about the business’, which allowed him to say anything he liked. Work was one big guessing game and innocuous actions would cause him to explode. The shock meant you’d be incapable of responding to it.”

Remind you of anyone? There’s an argument that the management style of celebrities such as Gordon Ramsay, Sir Alan Sugar and Simon Cowell don’t help. Most people confronted by such an approach would feel humiliated yet we tune in to point and laugh at chefs, apprentices and singers who are clearly distressed. Is it any wonder that we struggle to distinguish tough talking from bullying?

“What works on TV just doesn’t work in reality,” says CMI chief executive Ruth Spellman. “You can recognise tough behaviour if you know how, though. Ask whether your colleague or boss is a tough listener as well as a tough talker. Can you have your say as much as they have theirs? And are you confident you can trust them, and that they are acting consistently? If so they’re not necessarily your enemy. That confidence, consistency and trust could benefit you in a way that a bully never could.”

Some names have been changedWhat to do if you think you’re being bullied

First, talk it over with someone to establish whether the behaviour you are being subjected to really does constitute bullying. If you belong to a union, your rep should be able to help. DirectGov, Citizens Advice (0844 848 9600) and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (0845 604 6610) are also good contacts.

Acas, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (08457 474 747), offers advice and has a useful leaflet entitled Bullying and Harassment at Work, which is available by post or online. If you speak to an outside agency or charity, make sure it follows clear guidelines on maintaining confidentiality.

Once you are sure you are being bullied, take the following steps:

• Try to find out if anyone else you work with is suffering from or has ­witnessed bullying behaviour from the person concerned.

• Keep a diary of incidents, including dates, witnesses and your feelings at the time. Keep copies of emails you think form a wider pattern of bullying.

• Make the person aware of his or her behaviour and ask them to stop. You could ask a colleague or union official to act on your behalf.

• If you can’t confront the person, consider putting your objections to him or her in writing. Keep copies of any correspondence. Keep your tone unemotional, and stick to the facts.

• Employers are responsible for preventing bullying and harassment. If you decide to complain to your employer, ask for information on its grievance procedures.

• Instead of taking disciplinary action, your employer (or you) may wish to follow different ways of resolving the situation, such as mediation.

• If you have to resign due to bullying, take legal advice. You cannot make a legal claim directly about bullying, but you may be able to make a constructive dismissal claim against your employer on the grounds that it is neglecting its “duty of care”. You will have a better chance of success if you can show the tribunal you have followed the steps above and complied with any attempt by your employer to resolve the situation.

• Complaints can also sometimes be made under laws covering discrimination and harassment if, for example, you think you are being bullied on the grounds of age, sex, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, nationality or any personal characteristic. Graham Snowdon

To minimise the risk of bullying, employers should encourage appropriate behaviour from all employees in the workplace. They should not tolerate unacceptable conduct, should address complaints promptly and appropriately, …

If you are a manager it is your responsibility to prevent workplace bullying. If you are a recipient of bullying, you are not alone, take action. If you are a witness to workplace bullying, you can do something about it. …

Workplace Bullying: Applying Psychological Torture at Work

Have you been the victim of a workplace bully?

What happens when a schoolyard bully grows up and enters the workforce? Or worse, what if that bully becomes your boss? The result can be outright aggressive behavior or a subtle psychological torture that can make the workplace a living hell.

Someone close to me is experiencing a horrible case of psychological bullying at work. In her case, the main bully is a supervisor, but the supervisor has created an “inner circle” that helps in applying the bullying tactics. Her story caused me to look back on other cases of bullying at work that I have encountered. Unfortunately, there have been far too many.

What are the effects of bullying? Targeted employees can experience fear and anxiety, depression, and can develop a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder – leading to psychological harm and actual physical illness. This leads to absenteeism and turnover as bullied employees avoid or flee the torturous workplace.

What are some of the tactics bullies use in the workplace?

Threats.
Most commonly, bullies threaten the employment or career status of the employee. Threats of being fired, or in my friend’s case, a threat of “I will dock your pay!” can be particularly troubling (even though my friend is a union employee so her pay cannot actually be affected).

The Silent Treatment. Often a bully and his or her “inner circle” will ostracize victims to the extent of completely ignoring them – refusing to even acknowledge their presence. In other instances, the bullies will stop talking when the victim enters the room, but perhaps continue talking in hushed tones with furtive looks at the victim, giggling and/or making disapproving grunts. You know, the same kind of tactics used in the schoolyard.

Rumors and Gossip. Bullies love to spread lies and rumors about their victims, and these can sometimes be quite vicious. Although untrue, rumors and gossip can filter throughout the organization and actually tarnish an individual’s reputation. I’ve known many insidious cases where a bullied victim sought to fight back, and the bullies spread rumors that the victim was merely a “complainer” and a “problem employee.”

Sabotage. Bullies may go so far as sabotaging the victim’s work. This can be outright (e.g., destroying or stealing a work product, or more subtle (e.g., altering someone’s powerpoint presentation or omitting a page from a report).

What can you do if you are a victim of bullies? There is a very useful website, kickbully.com that discusses the causes and consequences of bullying and suggests how to fight back.

Let’s hear some of your stories of workplace bullies and how you fought back!

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